Arm-chair View of Revolution
C.N. Chitta Ranjan
1968 AND AFTER: INSIDE THE REVOLUTION by Tariq Ali Radhakrishna Prakashan, New Delhi, 1979, 216 pp., 35.00
Jan-Feb 1979, volume 3, No 4

Tariq Ali is a gifted writer but can hardly rank among the most coherent political thinkers of our times. Revolu­tion is not a subject on which any work, howsoever monumental, can be said to be the last word, and the book under review is by no means monumental. It reads like a collection of booklets, each written in a different mood, though there are two continuous threads—disapproval of established Communist parties and projection of Trotskyist thinking as the ultimate in revolutionary socialist thought. The canvas is unwieldy, and what emerges is far from comprehensive. The treatment is lopsided, with Europe ironically at the centre of the universe, a position that might have seemed credible up to the early forties.After Trotsky and after Stalin, there have been massive convulsions the world over, forming part of the continuing global revolution. Vietnam has contributed the most power­ful chapter in the phase that began in the late forties and early fifties. Despite dealing with Vietnam at one end and Chile at the other, the author seems to have kept a limited area in focus, geogra­phically and ideologically.

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